"No," Helen agreed. "But he gets to be the man who wrote it. That is all the truth I can give him."
By the time of the third-anniversary coffee, Helen had stopped wearing the black cardigan every day. She still owned it. She still put it on when the condominium's air conditioning made her shoulders cold, or when a certain kind of memory arrived weatherlike and sudden. But she had bought a blue sweater, and a gray one, and a scarf in a color Robert would have called impractical. Impracticality, she decided, was a form of continuing.
She had also stopped keeping the index cards in the recipe box. One evening she took them out and read them all in order, then out of order, then burned them in a metal bowl on the balcony while Diane watched from the doorway with Walter in her arms.
"Any last words?" Diane asked.
Helen held up the card that said I tipped her at New Year's. "Only that I am done confusing documentation with healing."
The smoke rose into the west light and vanished. The bowl cooled. Helen washed it in the sink as if it had held soup. Some rituals, she thought, work best when they look like chores.
And so when Margaret sat in the white-walled living room with coffee cooling between her palms, and Diane released the cat, and Helen refilled the cups, the scene was not a verdict and not an absolution. It was a practice. Three women who had been written into the same man's careful handwriting, learning — slowly, imperfectly, without a lawyer's yellow tab to guide them — how to write the next lines themselves.